Category Archives for Airlines.
Delta sometimes makes decent business class award space available to Europe, generally when prices are at their lowest for paid tickets. Getting to Asia on Delta can be much harder without paying exorbitant mileage costs (e.g. 200,000-plus miles per person in each direction).
However Delta’s partners, especially their Chinese partners China Southern and China Eastern, offer good availability from West Coast gateways.
After each quarterly earnings call American Airlines senior management holds a ‘State of the Airline’ town hall with employees, where employees can ask questions and get answers.
Some of those questions were about American’s decision to become less restrictive (allow full-sized carry on bags) with their basic economy fares, and the mechanics contract (an issue that never seems to get resolved). However there were several items of broader interest to customers or that offered new insights as well,
Aeromexico which is in some sense a vassal of Delta these days doesn’t own their own frequent flyer program in its entirety. Aimia owns nearly 49%.
And following on Air Canada’s public offer to buy Aeroplan, Aeromexico came in with a lowball offer to buy back their stake in the Club Premier program. It was an offer that was already rejected, but included a kicker straight from the Air Canada playbook.
Singapore Airlines will be flying non-stop from Newark to Singapore — the world’s longest flight — starting October 11.
When the flight was first loaded into the schedule you couldn’t get premium awards. However for some reason they’ve opened the floodgates. Most flights have business class awards available. And many have four or more business class awards available.
It’s difficult to see how United can stand alone, though, with the most draconian restrictions among the largest US airlines. With Delta’s claim that American and United basic economy were driving revenue to them, and with American abandoning their own carry on restriction, it’s just a matter of time before United must react.
On American’s earnings call this morning the airline tried to get ahead of disappointing financial performance both in absolute terms and relative to its largest competitors by announcing new aircraft deferments (reducing, or pushing into the future, capital expenses) and making other changes to their fleet in order to reduce the amount of product (seats) they sell.
On July 3rd I shared that American was poised to relax the most draconian restriction on their lowest-price Basic Economy fares, once again allowing customers on these lowest fares to bring both a personal item and a full sized carry on bag onto the plane. American refused to comment.
However this change has now been announced in this morning’s earnings release, and points to the failure of the business strategy of making your product worse in hopes of generating more revenue.
Air Canada along with Aeroplan’s financial partners has made an offer to buy Aeroplan, the spun-off frequent flyer program with which Air Canada has an exclusive agreement through June 2020.
The market seems to like this deal, or at least believes that the move signifies some deal will occur at a price premium over prior-day trading.
Aeroplan has now issued its response.
Pittsburgh was abandoned as a hub by US Airways starting around 2004. Twenty years ago they flew to about 120 destinations from Pittsburgh. By the end of the decade they had only half that number of flights and were using just 10 gates.
The airport has attracted new service from low cost carriers, but is no longer a hub. They haven’t had service to London since US Airways eliminated Gatwick service in 2004. Today the only transatlantic flying from Pittsburgh is seasonal Frankfurt service (Condor), seasonal Paris service (Delta) and year-round Reykjavík flights (Wow Air).
This morning I wrote that Air Canada made an offer to buy Aeroplan at a $2.25 billion valuation.
Aeroplan was spun off from Air Canada 13 years ago. It’s a separate, independent business that’s part of Aimia, a loyalty company which several other interests as well. Air Canada announced last year that they were going to start their own program and no longer work with Aeroplan.
Here’s more on what the proposed deal for Air Canada to re-acquire the Aeroplan program would look like.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
